A Story

Today I'm going to tell a story.

Once upon a time, there was a little boy named Jimmy. Jimmy, when he was very little, went to church every Sunday. In Sunday-school he learned all about Jesus. Jesus was a friendly-looking man dressed in bright colors who lived in drawings populated by other bright and colorful people. For some reason, every once in a while, those pictures were less bright and more gray. The Jesus person looked sad in those pictures, and was usually nailed to the wooden thing at the top of the church steeple.

Then, Jimmy got bigger. He moved up to the next Sunday-school class, were he began to memorize verses from the Bible. He memorized things like, "for God so loved the world, He gave His only begotten son, so that whosoever believed in Him would not perish, but have everlasting life." He didn't really know what it meant, but it sure sounded nice. It was often abbreviated with things like, "God so loved the world," when the pastor noticed people getting bored.

Jimmy kept growing, and one day he realized that he was supposed to be actually doing something, and not just memorizing Bible verse. So he found one of his friends in school, and invited him to church. He was immensely proud of his good deeds, and decided he should do even more.

When he got into his teenage years, he graduated from Sunday-school to the Youth Group. The Youth Pastor there was always talking about "witnessing to the lost." So he decided to try it out, since that's what a godly person should do.

So Jimmy told one of his friends about Jesus. This friend was an atheist, and told Jimmy so. "But why?" Jimmy asked.

His friend had lots of convincing arguments. Jimmy just laughed and said, "well, you're wrong. The Bible says that--"

"Wait, I don't believe in the Bible," his friend said.

Then Jimmy was confused. Now what should he say? So he went to his Youth Pastor, who showed him several verses in the Bible that demonstrated how true it must be. Jimmy, once again armed to the teeth with knowledge, went after the unbelievers once again. But once again, he was conquered. The fact that he was using the Bible to prove itself for some reason didn't work.

So Jimmy began to have doubts. If there was no good reason to believe in the Bible, why should he believe it? He also started to realize how much better life could be if he didn't have to follow all those silly rules. This, of course, meant the end of Jimmy's time in church. He looked back upon it as his "religious phase," and laughed at all those people who actually still believed such an old-fashioned idea.

The big question is, why is this story so common? What are we doing wrong? I think the answer if fairly simple: the church is only teaching the easy things. We say, "this is what the Bible says," because that's easy. But we don't explain why we should believe the Bible, which is a necessary piece of knowledge in order to survive in this world.

Maybe it's time to figure this out.
Mitchell